The historian Gaubil thinks that the national Annals make the most of these recurring calamities, having been written by the official scribes of the next dynasty, who sought to discredit the Mongol rule as much as possible[292]; but it is not suggested that the compilers had invented the series of disasters,--now in one province or river basin, now in another, at one time with thirteen millions of lives lost, at another with four hundred thousand families reduced to beggary, this time a drought, and next time a flood, and in another series of years a succession of destructive earthquakes. We are here concerned with discovering any possible relation that these disasters, coming one upon another almost without time for recovery, can have had to the engendering of the plague-virus. According to the rumours of the time, it was the corruption of unburied corpses in China which caused the Black Death; and certainly the unburied corpses were there, a _vera causa_, if that were all. Recent experiences in China make it easy for us to construct in imagination the state of the shores of rivers after those fatal inundations of the fourteenth century, or of the roadsides after the recurring famines. Thus, of the famine of 1878 it is said[293]: “Coffins are not to be got for the corpses, nor can graves be prepared for them. Their blood is a dispersed mass on the ground, their bones lie all about.... Pestilence [it is otherwise known to have been typhus fever] comes with the famine, and who can think of medicine for the plague or coffins for the multitude of the dead?” Or, again, according to a memorial in the official Peking Gazette of 16 January, 1878, “the roads are lined with corpses in such numbers as to distance all efforts for their interment[294].” There is much of sameness in the history of China from century to century; what happened in 1878, and again on a lesser scale two or three years ago, must have happened on an unparalleled scale year after year during the ill-starred period which ended about 1342; there must have been no ordinary break-down in the decencies and sanitary safeguards of interment in such years as 1334, when thirteen millions (two million, two hundred and seventy thousand families) were swept away by the floods of the Yang-tsi, or destroyed by hunger and disease. But we are not left altogether to the exercise of the imagination. A strangely vivid picture remains to us of a scene in China in those years, which a returning missionary saw as in a vision. The friar Odoric, of Pordenone, had spent six years in Northern China previous to 1327 or 1328, when he returned to Italy by one of the overland routes. The story of his travels[295] was afterwards taken down from his lips, and it is made to end with one gruesome scene, which is brought in without naming the time or the place. It is a vision of a valley of death, invested with the same air of generality as in Bunyan’s allegory of the common lot.